Search results for ""Turtle Point Press""

Turtle Point Press is pleased to introduce the Divining Poets Quotable Deck Series. These elegant, boxed sets of seventy-eight cards à la tarot decks feature short quotes meant to inspire, provoke, and guide users—to contemplate, memorize, or answer life questions. Here is the ever-astonishing Emily Dickinson. David Trinidad was struck by the Magic 8 Ball sound in his favorite bits from Emily Dickinson’s poems—mystical answers to questions one might ask about life and death. He chose seventy-eight, the number of cards in a tarot deck, and found they worked. This is a superlative selection of indelible gems to guide, ponder, and quote. The set includes a display stand, plus an instruction card with tips on how to use the deck. This is pocket-sized wisdom to give and to keep, here in perfect time for the holiday season.

Read more less

Turtle Point Press is pleased to introduce the Divining Poets Quotable Deck Series. These elegant, boxed sets of seventy-eight cards à la tarot decks feature short quotes meant to inspire, provoke, and guide users—to contemplate, memorize, or answer life questions. We begin with the great Rumi, in fresh and wonderfully accessible translations. Persian speakers often tell their fortunes and seek life advice by randomly choosing lines from their classical poets. Brad Gooch discovered why as he worked on Rumi’s Secret, his biography of the wisest poet of all, as well as his forthcoming Everyman's Library collaborative book of translations, Rumi: Unseen Poems, and his popular Twitter feed, @RumiSecrets. Speaking soul-to-soul, with cosmic intimacy, Rumi is always urgently telling us what we need to know on the journey of our lives in haunting, divine, radiant words. The set includes a display stand, plus an instruction card with tips on how to use the deck. This is pocket-sized wisdom to give and to keep, here in perfect time for the holiday season.

Read more less

This concentrated dose of the mystical wisdom of W.B. Yeats offers pleasure and insight to all who partake of it. “For nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent.”Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon carries on the influential tradition of Irish mystical poetry with the great words of William Butler Yeats. Yeats had a lifelong interest in Spiritualism; his work is rich in tarot and occult imagery. He asserted that a number of poems were “given” to him by supernatural powers. Yeats’s fierce ideas and images, coupled with his exquisite sense of rhyme, make for quotes that seekers will want to commit to memory. As Paul Muldoon explains, this poet is “supremely positioned to help us make sense of both the things of this world, the Otherworld, and the vast region between.” The Divining Poets Quotable Deck Series: Elegant, boxed sets of seventy-eight cards à la tarot decks, with oracular quotes from the world’s greatest visionary poets. Each card contains inspiring and provocative lines chosen for seekers to contemplate, memorize, or answer life questions. Complete with display stand and how-to instructions, this pocket-sized wisdom is perfect for the holiday season.

Read more less

Plainspoken, empowering, spare, wise beyond measure, Clifton’s words are a balm and a force of good for all: “The surest failure / is the unattempted walk.”Tracy K. Smith took a poetry workshop with Lucille Clifton following the death of her mother. The experience was an awakening. Clifton spoke of her own losses, centering not on the ideas of “letting go” or “making peace,” but of sustained communication with the departed. Clifton’s practices included using the Ouija board, or “spirit board,” as she called it, to make contact with the other world. “I sat rapt, envious, hopeful,” Smith writes, “listening to Clifton describe her own initiation into a fierce and forthright form of knowing.” Smith’s selections offer a gateway into the profound, moving, accessible, and useful notions of this essential poet. The Divining Poets Quotable Deck Series: Elegant, boxed sets of seventy-eight cards à la tarot decks, with oracular quotes from the world’s greatest visionary poets. Each card contains inspiring and provocative lines chosen for seekers to contemplate, memorize, or answer life questions. Complete with a display stand and how-to instructions, this pocket-sized wisdom is perfect for the holiday season

Read more less

Coles’s eighth collection probes the X of the unknown and of gender chromosomes with provocative smarts and sensitivity.Katharine Coles’s (Solve for) X opens a window in a room we did not realize was stuffy. The rigidity of knowledge yields to the beauty of the search, which is both captivating and mysterious. Organized as an abecedarium, the poems are couched in spare, emotionally charged diction that plumbs consciousness and moral responsibility. Coles meditates on an imaginary sister, impositions of the body on the mind, and the human mess that remains despite death or disaster. The mastery of how Coles writes and what she knows is matched only by her ease with the uncertain X. In (Solve for) X, she breaks down contrary ideas and reassembles them, harmoniously redesigned.

Read more less

"One of the best social observers in American fiction." —John Freeman, Literary Hub “Mr. Carroll's world is a little vicious, slippery in its sexuality . . . strangely reminiscent of the hootier, hard-candy end of the Tennessee Williams spectrum. It is flat-out odd, fun, and seeming true.” —Padgett Powell When Cuban fishermen first spotted the Key West lighthouse floating in Florida waters, they called her Stella Maris, Star of the Sea. It’s a beacon that draws people from everywhere seeking the end-of-the-line bohemian oasis that can still be found amidst the condo share towers, chain stores, and Redneck Riviera clientele. And it’s a mecca for gay men and the women who love them. Sue Kaufman Prize- winning author Michael Carroll knows the territory intimately. His stories wind in and out of the bars and guesthouses and lives of this singular paradise: a memorial for a drag queen held at the vicar’s Victorian leads to uneasy encounters; two southern sisters on a cruise ship holiday are up against the ravages of alcohol, estrangement, and deadly weather. Newly divorced gay men (already a phenomenon) lick their wounds and bask in the island’s lasting social twilight. At the all-male, clothing-optional resort, guys of all ages fall into one another’s paths, enjoy themselves as they please, and surprise one another on their views and preconceptions. Stella Maris is about the verities of illness and death. The past and its prisoners, AIDS, the young and not so young man’s realization of his own mortality. It’s about the unpredictable nature of life, and of survival. It’s about new beginnings and final recognitions.

Read more less

Jonathan Williams is a poet, publisher, photographer, polemicist,champion correspondent and cross-country promenader.

Read more less

Ashby Porter creates a world of flowering sadness, Spanish Moss and trailer parks. It is a tale of love ruined under the burning Florida sun amid phantasmagorical settings where present and future, life and death, love and aggression become entangled. The Near Future is a little jewel of a book, a very funny novel about getting - among other things - old, and in Florida, and with less than one's entire dignity in tact. Porter's comic imagination is of the truly droll sort, he homes very closely upon the truth. - Richard Ford

Read more less

A groundbreaking deconstruction of the classic 1950 film All About Eve, Phoebe 2002 is a collaborative epic poem/essay that zings in and out of scenes and makes a thousand connections within the world of popular culture. Drawing from high and low sources, the poets relate All About Eve to everything from Paradise Lost and The Odyssey to Rosemary's Baby, Silence of the Lambs and Scooby-Doo. Inspired by nine muses, including Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, all of whom make appearances throughout, Phoebe 2002 seamlessly pushes the limits of poetry and film criticism.

Read more less

A remarkable satire about a talking parrot written by Golden Age Hollywood screenwriter.

Read more less

A New York Times Book Review New & Noteworthy Selection "The Marble Bed is a vision; it is an ode to life."—Rowan Ricardo Phillips "Each poem in The Marble Bed journeys far, wandering the territory of love's psyche."—Yusef Komunyakaa "One of the permanent poets of her generation."—Harold Bloom Grace Schulman rises to new heights in these poems of lament and praise. In The Marble Bed, a couple dances on a shore that is at once a shining turf and a graveyard of sea toss, of cracked shells, a skull-like carapace, and emerald weed. Here things sparkle with newness: an orchid come alive when rescued from a trash bin; the new year hidden in an egret's wing; Coltrane's ecstatic flight; a seductive, come-hither angel; a meteor's arc; a rainbow's painted ribbons; a glacial rock that glowers in moonlight. Even the tomb sculptures in an Italian cemetery sparkle with vitality. Schulman, grieving for her late husband, believes passionately in the power of art to redeem human transience. Her faith in art enables her to move from mourning to joyful wonder of existence as she meditates on an injured world and concludes: "Because I cannot lose the injured world / without losing the world, / I'll have to praise it."

Read more less

Introduction by Andrew SolomonAs a young girl growing up in the ’40s on a vast estate near Munich, Trixi Ost lives a life that is charmed by talent and privilege yet scarred by turbulent times. She enjoys the attentions of a beloved grandfather who sings her songs and holds forth in Latin, the pig and the deer she keeps as pets, and a wide freedom to roam. But everyday routine is swiftly upended as the estate becomes temporary home to an unlikely collection of people displaced by the war: distant relatives, forced laborers, Prussian royals, Polish peasants, generals, and even a few spies. One bright afternoon, a band of Easterners arrive: “The farm community gathered…staring rigidly at the approaching strangers in their desiccated floral colors, the skin of their faces gaunt and gray like dusty paper…. Who were they? Where were they coming from on this June day? Dachau, breathed the young man who led them, almost inaudibly.”Rendered with insight, humor, and an acute visual lyricism, and sprinkled with fairy tales, rhymes, and family photographs, My Father’s House is a unique exploration of the powers of sense memory and of a little-known chapter in the history of German private life.Style icon Beatrix Ost arrived in New York in 1975 and was swiftly discovered by the New York Times as one of the city's most elegant fusions of art and fashion. She has written screenplays, produced movies and theater, and acted in films and on the stage. She lives in New York City and Charlottesville, Virginia.

Read more less

Nomadologies is a complex and brilliant evocation of the fractured and hyphenated mindset of the contemporary Turkish writer and thinker. Erdag Göknar takes us on a dazzling virtual world tour encompassing history, aesthetics, and politics, from Bosnia to Chechnya to the Silk Road to Union Square and back to the place that was once the center of the civilized world, Istanbul/Constantinople. Turkophiles like myself have been waiting for years for Göknar to publish his findings from the multilayered world he inhabits, and here it is. This is a book I shall be returning to often.—Richard Tillinghast, author of An Armchair Traveller’s History of Istanbul and cotranslator of Dirty August by Edip CanseverThe poems in Nomadologies connect moments of separation and union in a life lived between Turkey and America. Taking its organizing principle from the grammar of nomadic life, Nomadologies reveals that mobility is the most efficient strategy for sustaining contradictory existences. Here, we learn that poetry is a landscape of inhabitation, and perpetual exile is one's home.Erdag Göknar is a scholar, writer, and translator. He is best known for his award-winning translation of Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk's novel My Name Is Red. He is a faculty member at Duke University where he researches, teaches, and writes on Turkish Studies.

Read more less

“Beatrix uses words like she uses paint. . .with brush strokes so vivid and rich I feel as if I’m there watching as her story unfolds. I love this book!” –Sissy SpacekBeatrix Ost’s memoir of her artistic awakening and early marriage opens on the heels of Germany’s recovery from the self-imposed disasters of World War II. She is part of the new generation that dances disobediently in the bombed-out villas and underground jazz caverns of Munich. Beatrix rides the dynamic decade up through the world of art, fashion, and cinema into the revolution of politics and consciousness.Marriage to the self-made prodigy and archaeologist, Ferdinand, impresario of the Hot Club, draws her into the mystical realm of the ancient Mexican gods. Soon, two sons are born. They make an odyssey through Mexico where, under the wing of the artistic elite, their homes full of Riveras and Kahlos, the initial impression is intoxicating. But the further they press inland, the more Ferdinand loses himself in his obsession and addictions.Ost draws us into the vortex of human craving to portray the complexities of her early marriage to a man scarred by the war, climbing the magical mountain of his own desires.Accompanied by the author’s artwork and photographs from her private collection, Ost “…shakes free of an impossibly dark life as the wife of an alcoholic…brushes off the stardust of romance and, stepping back in the light, comes into her own.” (Barbara Epler, President, New Directions Publishing)

Read more less

Charles North is the master of the relaxed, urban and often wistful lyrical line. This new collection will delight fans and newcomers alike.

Read more less

"This is a gorgeous book, one that will inspire anyone to make the next sentence."—Jericho Brown, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 2020"A hymn of praise for the craft of weaving words in order to survive."—Kitty Kelley Roger Rosenblatt has always been “mad about the writing life.” In this new collection, he shares the stories and insights about writing that have inspired him, as a journalist, a columnist for The Washington Post, an essayist for Time magazine and The New Republic, and then as the author of best-selling books like Making Toast, Rules for Aging, Kayak Morning, and Unless It Moves the Human Heart. The new and beloved pieces in The Story I Am: Mad About the Writing Life, drawn from his vast body of work, celebrate the art, the craft, and the soul of writing.Here are essays and excerpts on the rewards and punishments of the life of a writer, along with thoughts on how to write, what to write, and why writing lies at the heart of human hope and experience. Reviewing Rosenblatt’s memoir The Boy Detective in the New York Times Book Review, Pete Hamill said Rosenblatt “writes the way a great jazz musician plays, moving from one emotion to another.” For Rosenblatt, writing, like jazz, is the art of improvisation. Rosenblatt writes that “Writing makes justice desirable, evil intelligible, grief endurable, and love possible.” In a nutshell, it’s worth a life.

Read more less

The irreverent, tweetable, ludicrous, painful, wondrous work of the L.A. punk poet—widely available for the first time. In Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World, David Trinidad brings together a comprehensive selection of Ed Smith’s work: his published books; unpublished poems; excerpts from his extensive notebooks; photos and ephemera; and his timely “cry for civilization,” “Return to Lesbos”: put down that gun / stop electing Presidents. Ed Smith blazed onto the Los Angeles poetry scene in the early 1980s from out of the hardcore punk scene. The charismatic, nerdy young man hit home with his funny/scary off-the-cuff-sounding poems, like “Fishing”: This is a good line. / This is a bad line. This is a fishing line. Ed’s vibrant “gang” of writer and artist friends—among them Amy Gerstler, Dennis Cooper, Bob Flanagan, Mike Kelley, and David Trinidad—congregated at Beyond Baroque in Venice, on LA’s west side. They read and partied and performed together, and shared and published each others’ work. Ed was more than bright and versatile: he worked as a math tutor, an animator, and a typesetter. In the mid-1990s, he fell in love with Japanese artist Mio Shirai; they married and moved to New York City. Despite productive years and joyful times, Ed was plagued by mood disorders and drug problems, and at the age of forty-eight, he took his own life. Ed Smith’s poems speak to living in an increasingly dehumanizing consumer society and corrupt political system. This “punk Dorothy Parker” is more relevant than ever for our ADD, technology-distracted times.

Read more less

A New York Times Book Review New & Noteworthy Selection "Grace Schulman makes me want to live to be four hundred years old, because she makes me feel there is so much out there, and it's unbearable to miss any of it."—Wallace Shawn Grace Schulman is an award-winning poet and the author of seven collections of poems. She has had long posts as Poetry Editor of the Nation magazine, Director of the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y, and Distinguished Professor at CUNY’s Baruch College, where she still teaches. But her love for her scientist husband and her care for him through his long illness proved to be among her greatest inspirations. It called forth her deepest grief at his loss. How did Schulman maintain the independence, solitude, and freedom she required within the bounds of marriage? And what made her marriage endure through a decade of living apart? “In my experience, the phrase ‘happy marriage’ is a term of opposites, like ‘friendly fire’ or ‘famous poet.’ My marriage has been a feast of contradiction . . . ” Strange Paradise looks at this, Schulman’s remarkable career, her friendships with great writers, her work as an historic impresario at the Y, her religious and philosophical leanings, and her grand love affair with New York—all in her magical prose.

Read more less

The first English translation of BERLIN by the great French poet Jules Laforgue, whose works greatly influenced T S Eliot and Ezra Pound. Shortly before his death, Laforgue, who has been called the French Keats, was appointed the daily French Reader' to the Empress Augusta, a descendant of Catherine the Great and a German princess who despised most things German. This book is a precise, witty detail of everyday Berlin life in the 1880's.'

Read more less

"A masterpiece of women’s frontier experience!" —KATHY SCHULZ, author of The Underground Railroad in Ohio"This is an amazing book, and I couldn’t stop reading it." —JOAN SILBER, PEN/Faulkner and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Secrets of Happiness and Improvement"An awesome account of female survival at a horrific time." —BOOKLISTA most unusual portrait of early America based on a rare family document, in which a young mother’s years in captivity with the Shawnee prove to be the best years of her life.It''s 1779 and a young white woman named Margaret Erskine is venturing west from Virginia, on horseback, with her baby daughter and the rest of her family. She has no experience of Indians, and has absorbed most of the prejudices of her time, but she is open-minded, hardy, and men

Read more less

"As adept working with the sonnet and sestina as with loose-fitting lines, Howard produces poems of great immediacy that stir with emotional depth. . . . [His] vision of our post-9/11 culture is offbeat, yet 'wisdomtight.'"—David Trinidad Eric Howard’s debut poetry collection reveals the secrets that bind office work to war, Gidget to the damned, the Bible to popular song, mythology to fact, and Los Angeles to Ovid. On a bicycle ride through heavy traffic, it versifies the last days of a failed pimp, gives a tarot reading to warplanes, and deciphers the hieroglyphics of lost empire.Eric Howard is an LA-based poet and editor. His work has appeared in the Birmingham Poetry Review, Caveat Lector, Conduit, Gulf Stream Magazine, Hawaii Pacific Review, Plainsong, The Sun, and in the anthology Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond.

Read more less

A WORLD LITERATURE TODAY NOTABLE TRANSLATION OF 2022A sudden catastrophe in Europe exposes the slow-motion destruction of a generation of Venezuelans and their struggle against repression. In The Lisbon Syndrome, a disaster annihilates Portugal's capital. In Caracas, Lisbon's sister city and home to many thousands of Portuguese, few details filter through the censored state media. Fernando runs a theater program for young people in Caracas, teaching and performing classics like Macbeth and Mother Courage. His benefactor, Old Moreira, is a childless Portuguese immigrant who recalls the Lisbon of his youth. Fernando’s students suffer from what they begin to call “the Lisbon syndrome,” an acute awareness that there are no possibilities left for them in a country devastated by a murderous, criminal regime. A series of confrontations between demonstrators and government forces draw the students and their teacher toward danger. One disappears into the state secret prisons where dissidents are tortured. The arts center that was their sanctuary is attacked, and Fernando is pulled into the battle in the streets. The Lisbon Syndrome is the most trenchant contemporary novel to offer a glimpse of life and death in Venezuela. But Sánchez Rugeles’s bleak vision is lightened by his wry humor, and by characters who show us the humanity behind stark headlines.

Read more less

"Playful, brooding, skeptical, ironic—Sanders turns high-jinks edginess into compassionate art in this crafty and urgent book of warnings."—Edward Hirsch

Read more less

The most original book of Julien Gracq's later output is about Nantes. It begins with a quotation from Beaudelaire that is repeated and distorted. Nantes, still haunted by Andr© Breton, Jacques Vache and Rimbaud behind them is reconstructed from a remembered image in which the lyc©e Cl©menceau occupies the centre. Pathos filtered through humour guides the author as he writes of a child's experience of the hierarchy of urban spaces. This is a beautiful work, provocative and powerfully set amid verifiable and equally moving land- and cityscapes.

Read more less

Born into a celebrity family (her father was Watson's son, who turned the company into the powerhouse it still is today, and her mother, Olive, had dated Howard Hughes and John F. Kennedy), Jeannette Watson's larger-than-life family hid a number of secrets. Behind a facade of order and glamour, Tom Watson often experienced dark moods; his depression was something he passed on to his daughter. Jeannette felt she could never measure up to her mother-a legendary beauty-and kept her nose buried in books.Through her years as a debutante, then young wife and mother, Watson kept her feelings under wraps until she had a mental breakdown. As part of her fight to heal herself, she left her husband, taking their son and moving to New York City to experience its heady 1970s freedoms. She opened the legendary Upper East Side bookstore Books & Co., which became a gathering place for literati. Her personal life soared once more when she met her second husband, Alex Sanger, grandson of Planned Parenthood's founder, with whom she had two more sons. After a long and fulfilling run, the bookstore closed and Watson found her way down a new path to become a spiritual healer.It's My Party is a portrait of another era, a guide to dealing with depression, and one woman's deep effort to understand herself.

Read more less

Christopher Cahill's debut collection is intensely seductive and inventively disquieting. An omnivore of poetry, Cahill's influences range from contemporary poetry, Irish poetry, Victorian poetry to Classical Latin. Described as the heir of James Schuyler and Phillip Larkin, Cahill's verse heightens and degrades at the same time; his tone is one of nostalgia and scorn. The Drug of Choice is a lush and lacerating debut collection of poetry.

Read more less

For Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera, poet David Trinidad watched all 514 episodes of the infamous 1960s 'adult' primetime soap opera and wrote a haiku for everyone. Fraught relationships, courtroom cliffhangers and sensational storylines are condensed into 17-syllable episodes, as stereotypic characters weather the passing TV seasons. This haiku 'soap epic' is ingenious, funny and totally addictive.

Read more less

Originally written in 1928, A Voyage to the Island of the Arcticoles is a wildly imaginative work from the French biographer, novelist, essayist Andre Maurois. Somewhere between Hawaii and Tahiti, en route to the Marquesas, a couple find their ship blown off course by a storm. They land in the harbour of the privately-owned island of the Articoles, where society is highly ordered and the only people who are really looked up to are the literary descendents of the original literary settlers. A fantastical novella which is a sly critique of the snobbisms of writing communities.

Read more less

A collection of lucid, whimsical, wise, succint and sometimes biting musings by a young Australian living in New York. Author James Guida revives an old form, the aphorism, in order to turn his eye to 21 century scenarios. The comedy of internet dating, email fiascos and improvised postmodern mores - whatever the subject, Guida's conclusions are independent minded and go against the grain.

Read more less

In a voice that is urgent, Howard Altmann asks the world to be patient with all that it cannot hear. Poet John Ashberry calls Altmann's interrogations and his hypnotic, mysterious and dreamlike poems 'as essential as a glass of water'.

Read more less

A friend and confident of Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein and many other dazzling figures from the 20th century, Lord Berners is now truly coming into his own. A newly discovered autobiographical reverie, Dresden, offers a window into the adolescence of an extremely perceptive and sensitive young man. Like Proust, it is in the deeply personal where Berners shines the brightest. Dresden is the final volume in his series of autobiographical work which are both charming and subtle.

Read more less

“A quiver of eclogues, couplets, Zen epigrams, and you-name-it literary mischief. The fun is all ours.” –Foreword Reviews “Mott’s whiplash insights are as provocative as coiled springs.” —Douglas Crase “Mott’s lyrical antics embody poetry at its most earnest and parodic, a deadly potion stolen from the fountain of imagination.” —Yunte Huang Glenn Mott’s Eclogues recast a classic pastoral form, making it uniquely suited to our times. He considers the inheritance of authority with a mixture of candor and humor in observations on social, natural, and metaphysical transactions. Inspired by China’s Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden, these epigrams, poems, and prose meditations achieve a heightened perception, transcending the garden variety truths of both East and West.

Read more less

"Easily ranks among the best fiction I've read this year.” —David Abrams “If you’ve come to look for America, it's here in The Big Impossible. Taut, urgent, emotionally powerful stories about the families, workers, and dreamers who are our neighbors, and Delaney’s range and sense of history make him the perfect writer to illuminate their lives.” —Christopher Castellani, author of Leading Men The short fiction in Ted Delaney's new collection explores guilt and redemption, aspiration and failure, and the stubbornness of modest hopes. The usual mileposts are fading, and choice is in the context of institutions and assumptions that are no longer holding steady. In “Clean,” a man waits for inevitable justice to come, as much as it will play against him. In “House of Sully,” a working-class family navigates the tumultuous year that 1968 was, as new perceptions shake long-held and dependable, if sometimes misguided, beliefs. Other stories examine the inner life of a school shooter, the comical posturing of writers at a literary party, a British veteran of The Great War living at a Florida retirement home but haunted by his losses, and a man’s bittersweet visits to past lives via Google Street View. In the sequence set in the West, an itinerant worker moves across the Great Plains, navigating stark landscapes, trying for foothold. The Atlantic’s C. Michael Curtis praised Ted Delaney’s debut collection for its “moral intensity . . . in the tradition of writers as varied as Ethan Canin and William Trevor.” Two decades later Delaney returns to the short fiction form with utter mastery.

Read more less

"A tour de force of deep knowledge, uncanny powers of observation, and brilliant tragicomic invention." —James Lasdun“A remarkable and very moving feat of storytelling.” —Andrew HolgateA Foreword Reviews Editor's pick!Money makes Beijing go round in Jonathan Tel's seductive, puzzle-like novel-in-stories. China is the center of the world, and the center of China is Beijing, and at the center of Beijing is a billionaire financier named Qin. At the opening of this novel-in-stories, billionaire Qin is lying in state at his funeral, victim of a sudden and premature death. Moving back and forth in time, we meet a wide range of Chinese, all linked to Qin by a degree or two of separation: a property developer, a street artist, a prostitute, a fashion model, a spy, a thief, an expat lawyer, a muckraking journalist. By the end of this biting, post-post-modern cultural observation, the manner of Qin’s death is revealed. Scratching the Head of Chairman Mao presents today’s China in its full and fabulous complexity.

Read more less

“One part Scheherazade, two parts Boccaccio, a twist of Bolaño, and a dash of bitters. Blue Label is intoxicating, hilarious, and the best novel on the calamity that is today’s Venezuela.”—Carmen Boullosa "This deftly and idiomatically translated novel . . . a quest of sorts, as a high school student in Chávez's Venezuela tries to make sense of love and life . . . packs a punch on many levels: personal, political, and even mythic." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Eugenia Blanc, a young Caraqueñan and quintessential teenager at war with the world around her, has one aim: after graduating from high school, to abandon Venezuela definitively. She embarks on a spontaneous road trip in a banged-up Fiat with her rebellious classmate Luis Tévez, in search of her grandfather, the one person who can provide her with the documents that would allow her to leave the country. While Eugenia and Luis’s tentative, troubled romance unfolds during the Chávez era, the story also looks back at Venezuela’s “lost decade” of the 1990s, a time of intractable violence, inequality, corruption, and instability that led to Chávez’s election. With an unvarnished fluidity that brings to mind Jack Kerouac and a crazy-ass playlist that ranges from REM to Bob Dylan to El Canto del Loco to Shakira, Blue Label is an audacious, dark novel with a gut-punch of an ending; the prize-winning first book by a writer who has cemented his reputation as a major young Latin American voice.

Read more less

Detailing the life of Jazz Age magician Robert The Great' Rouncival, The Magician's Study is an extended tour of the deceased conjurer's study and the wondrous possessions therein. Through these disparate objects, including a desk stolen from Chekhov's estate, the audacious personality of the young magician is revealed. Cantankerous, acerbic, self-centred and an inebriate womaniser, Robert nevertheless captures the imagination as he blazes a blackly comic path from Bowery flophouse to stardom upon the great stages of the world.'

Read more less

Making use of the old name for psychoanalysis in his title, American Book Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Howard's poems are spoken out of a solitude and into a solitude, but passing through a company of some order, some chaos. Themed throughout with concerns of the psyche and psychoanalysis, a comic atmosphere yet pervades in this humble, yet triumphant work.

Read more less

In Psalm to Whom(e), the restless and astonishing Diane Glancy continues to break new ground with a hybrid collection of personal writings that considers the relationship between place and faith; the need for movement, stability, and inner exploration; and the search for home. Psalm to Whom(e) centers on Kansas and rural Texas, places that usually see the underside of planes. Glancy focuses on geography. History. Origins. Memory. Faith. Once in a while, in desperation, she offers a prayer to whom(e)ver is there. Glancy stretches and pulls the language to see behind the words: old Native thought patterns, for instance, or echoes of Gertrude Stein. She takes us with her into museums, churches, and national parks, shuttling freely between personal, cultural, and spiritual history, narration and poetic exploration. Psalm to Whom(e) defines the world as a place on which to mark, as evidenced in the earliest pictographs. Embedded in the markings on cave walls and rock facings are circles and spirals in which the impulses to move, to travel, to migrate, to explore one’s own inner wilderness and solitude are homed. The “whom(e)” is in an essay, “Among My Friends Are Letters of the Alphabet.” “As a loner I write a lot because I have to have something to do and the letters of the alphabet always are there.” The isolation of Covid may have driven her farther back into history, she says. Into the beginning of faith on the prairie. Into her own believing on her grandfather’s farm and her own father’s work in the stockyards. “Sometimes I add letters to words. As an ‘e’ as in ‘whome’ because then I see home, for which I always am looking.”

Read more less

"These are stories to cherish, as brilliant and charming as the writer himself."—Olivia Laing "The sensibility of a magician, a trickster's dark humor, and a formidable musical and literary erudition."—The New York Times Joseph Keckler's signatures are his magnificent three-plus-octave operatic voice and the mesmerizing stories he tells. Combining original pieces with material from his acclaimed performances, Keckler confirms his storytelling mastery, revealing still more of himself on the page.In these tales, one can't easily draw a line between reality, embellishment, and fantasy. Odd jobs and odder employers: what is it like to work for a blind man who runs an art gallery? Or for an aging club kid who administers a university classics department? These outré characters make an artful spectacle of daily life. Some strive to be center stage and others struggle to be seen, but all soldier on in the margins. In this world, you may board a familiar bus or train and find yourself in some shady netherworld, or skipping past midnight on New Year's Eve. There is sex with ghosts. And the incessant GPS voice that mocks the last moments of a longtime love.A celebration of the ridiculous and a tour through stations of longing, this diverse collection will thrill devotees and new fans alike.

Read more less

Widow's Dozen, Marek Waldorf's mind-bending, genre-blending short story collection, offers 11 coruscating stories from a past that never was to a future too late to forestall. Subtle lives - nostalgia lit, lovingly textured - bridge currents in catastrophe from the impossible to the remote to the inevitable. A captivating vision of America's dismembered states, that is less science fiction than future-shock treatment.

Read more less

The year is 2024. Climate change has altered the world’s wave patterns. Drones crisscross the sky, cars drive themselves, and surfing is a new Olympic sport. Mafuri Long, UCSD marine biology grad, champion surfer, and only female to dominate a record eighty-foot wave, still has something to prove. Having achieved Internet fame, along with sponsorship from Google and Nike, she’s intent on winning Olympic gold. But when her father, a clinically depressed former Navy captain and widower, learns that his beloved supercarrier, the USS Hillary Rodham Clinton, is to be sunk, he draws Mafuri into a powerful undertow. Conflicts compound as Mafuri’s personal life comes undone via social media, and a vicious Aussie competitor levels bogus doping charges against her. Mafuri forms an unlikely friendship with an awkward teen, a Ferrari-driving professional gamer who will prove to be her support and ballast. Authentic, brutal, and at times funny, Mafuri lays it all out in a sprightly, hot-wired voice. From San Diego to Sydney, Key West, and Manila, That Crazy Perfect Someday goes beyond the sports/surf cliché to explore the depths of sorrow and hope, yearning and family bonds, and the bootstrap power of a bold young woman climbing back into the light.Michael Mazza is a San Francisco-area fiction writer whose stories have appeared in Other Voices, WORDS, Blue Mesa Review, TINGE, and ZYZZYVA. He is also an internationally acclaimed art and creative director working in the advertising industry. That Crazy Perfect Someday is his first novel.

Read more less

Koestenbaum's book of poems minces memory and culture into titbits to propose a new 'nude' poetics. The collection draws upon his signature themes - stardom, scapegoating, aestheticism, nudism, exaltation - and cuts them into serial strips. Using techniques such as pointillism, mosaic, aphorism, litany and philosophical investigation, the poet trips through a memory theatre whose luminaries range from Yvonne De Carlo to Hannah Arendt and assembles melancholy tesserae into tidily stanzaic sacrificial offerings.

Read more less

A passionate, heartbreaking story of authority and revenge, alcoholism and futile redemption set in South Boston in the late 1990s. Told in short, tight, intertwined chapters, Broken Irish gives voice to the voiceless, portraying the shattered hopes of a disintegrating neighbourhood dominated by dependence on alcohol, revenge and the ghostly presence of a secretive, hypocritical church. Exploring pertinent issues of abuse within the Catholic church, it will appeal to a wide audience, while its graceful, spellbinding style will not go unnoticed in literary circles.

Read more less

Ventures into new, sometimes unprecedented, territory - from the luxe restraint of Merrymount through the stops-out eroticism of Pending and the distilled heebie-jeebies of Dream On. Here, reading, travel and sexual orientation (and disorientation) loom larger than before in Porter and the dialogue gives new play for what Harry Mathews has called Porter's golden ear'.'

Read more less

The linked stories of Wild Punch portray the revelatory moments of small-timers, clergymen, hot-heads, labourers, motorcycle racers, loggers, young veterans and horse farmers across Northern New England. Sometimes quiet and sometimes raucous, Creston Lea's stories chronicle lives changing course. Lea is an author who clearly loves his characters. He understands their contradictions and their stark daily realities and he writes about them with an authority based on authenticity, generosity, grace and sharply observed humanity.

Read more less

A daring collaborative celebrity autobiography by two of America's finest poets, D.A. Powell and David Trinidad

Read more less

This suburban California coming of age navigates Trinidad’s personal history in the shadow of Hollywood, against the dramas of the 1960s and ’70s.“Trinidad’s pieces teach us how memory and history are forms of yearning, and about what can and cannot be recovered.” —Amy Gerstler “This is the writing of a poet who loves the world into language.” —Aaron Smith Poet David Trinidad’s past is rich fodder for a collection of memory pieces that wind the reader through the underbelly of 1960s and ’70s America—and Southern California, more specifically. In Trinidad’s recollections, the proximity to Hollywood both glamorizes and condemns the bustling suburbs. Stains of the Manson murders and adoration for The Boys in the Band are documented with the same care as fascinations with Barbie dolls and twelve-cent comic books. The struggles of an awkward gay teenager meld into the weighty anecdotes of a young man who befriends famous writers, acts as a historian for familial legacies, and confronts the limitations of desire. The title piece, “Digging to Wonderland,” presents a young David Trinidad and his friend Nancy as they tunnel into the ground of her backyard, in search of the next great adventure. Ultimately, we witness a childhood spent under the threat of annihilation: “So the ‘twinkly lights’ in the hills above Chatsworth were actually missiles armed with nuclear warheads. And without knowing it, I grew up under their spell.”

Read more less

A BOOKLIST EDITORS' CHOICE, 2021 Diane Glancy once again puts Indigenous women at the center of American history in her account of a young Inupiat woman who survived a treacherous arctic expedition alone. "This moving retelling of a heroic woman’s journey demonstrates that history lives through an intimate connection between two women beyond time’s borders."—Booklist, starred review In September 1921, a young Inupiat woman named Ada Blackjack traveled to Wrangel Island, 200 miles off the Arctic Coast of Siberia, as a cook and seamstress, along with four professional explorers. The expedition did not go as planned. When a rescue ship finally broke through the ice two years later, she was the only survivor. Diane Glancy discovered Blackjack’s diary in the Dartmouth archives and created a new narrative based on the historical record and her vision of this woman’s extraordinary life. She tells the story of a woman facing danger, loss, and unimaginable hardship, yet surviving against the odds where four “experts” could not. Beyond the expedition, the story examines Blackjack’s childhood experiences at an Indian residential school, her struggles as a mother and wife, and the faith that enabled her to survive alone on a remote island in the Arctic Sea. Glancy’s creative telling of this heroic tale is a high mark in her award-winning hybrid investigations of suffering, identity, and Native American history.

Read more less